{"id":154121,"date":"2022-12-10T22:11:18","date_gmt":"2022-12-10T22:11:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/guillermo-del-toro-was-an-animator-until-a-pooping-burglar-derailed-him\/"},"modified":"2022-12-10T22:11:18","modified_gmt":"2022-12-10T22:11:18","slug":"guillermo-del-toro-was-an-animator-until-a-pooping-burglar-derailed-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/guillermo-del-toro-was-an-animator-until-a-pooping-burglar-derailed-him\/","title":{"rendered":"Guillermo del Toro was an animator \u2014 until a pooping burglar derailed him"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director of Pan’s Labyrinth<\/em>, The Shape of Water<\/em>and Pacific Rim<\/em>, has always been an animator. thigh Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio<\/em>, out now on Netflix, is his first animated feature film, arriving 30 years into his career. Things could have been very different. Back before he made his debut with the 1992 vampire movie Cronos<\/em>del Toro was actually prepping a full-length stop-motion animated movie. <\/p>\n

\u201cI started on animation,\u201d del Toro tells Polygon. \u201cThe earliest Super 8s I did were animation. I had an animation and effects company for 15 years. We did commercials. I started the stop-motion movement in my city. I taught stop-motion, and I was preparing a stop-motion movie before Cronos<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Then disaster struck. \u201cMy brother, my then-girlfriend and I, we fabricated 120 puppets in clay. We did the sets. And one night, we went to dinner and to a movie. And when we came back, our place had been burglarized. They had destroyed every puppet, they had pooped and peed on the floor. And I turned around \u2014 it was three years of work \u2014 and I said, ‘I’m gonna do Cronos<\/em>. I’m gonna do a live-action movie.’\u201d<\/p>\n

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Image: Netflix<\/cite><\/p>\n

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It must have been a devastating blow. It took decades for del Toro to find his way back to the medium, although his return seemed inevitable: As he characterizes it: \u201cSince then, I’ve been taking a very deliberate detour back to animation.\u201d The \u201cdetour\u201d included co-directing some episodes of his Netflix CGI animated series, Trollhunters<\/em>, and employing considerable practical creature effects and CGI sequences in his live-action films. \u201cIf you know Pacific Rim<\/em>you’ve seen 45 minutes of animation directed by me,\u201d he points out.<\/p>\n

But for his entire creative life, one project has lingered in his mind that, he felt, had to be done solely in animation, and stop-motion animation at that: pinocchio<\/em>. For del Toro, Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century tale of a wooden puppet brought to life was perfect for the medium, and he couldn’t understand why nobody else had done it yet.<\/p>\n